Stage Acting on TV, as Brought to You by Lost

Doesn't matter, when it comes to ABC's Lost, whether you're of the big-fking-deal camp or one of the lonely, uninitiated millions (though if the latter, a coupla guys around the office have been catching up with the enhanced episodes here): In the second half of its final season, the show has become, too late but still soon enough to trigger aftershocks in a post-Cowell tsunami of actually good programming, a kind of universal theater. Last night, for instance, once the literal tsunami and all the too-good-for-TV visual effects that came with it were through, there was no Mulliganian melodrama nor Gallactical sci-fi — just three men and a parable. The most important of whom, it should be noted, spent five years following around Brooke Shields as a must-see-TV stereotype, but Nestor Carbonell is also a seriously trained actor whose Judas-as-Caliban backstory played out on a little stage inside my DVR.

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So, too, should David Simon's and trained playwright Eric Overmyer's Treme, which, unlike its cliché-in-the-face fellow HBO newbian, The Pacific, aims for character over conscience — and seasoned talent over, say, the hard bodies of the campy drama over at USA. Granted, you've got to earn that aim — Simon flat-out ignored requests to make, you know, a television show — but this spring and summer, for the first time in a while, offer more macabre than midseason replacement: Breaking Bad into Mad Men over at AMC, Sons of Anarchy into Rescue Me on FX, and, lest the "hustle" of How to Make It in America doesn't quite do it for you via HBO headquarters, Pacino-as-Kavorkian and, at last, the reincarnation of a Soprano as Depression-era Brooklynite. Much has been made of the Scarlett Johanssons of the world making their way to Broadway, but for my buck, I'd just as soon have it the other way around. And if you need any more evidence that the thespians have infiltrated your television, well, look no further than one Jonathan Stewart: